My darling has a Compaq Presario C500 running LxPup-Precise-Retro 14.02 generally quite happily and I'm not allowed near it because I "break it."
She is saving out data from Ancestry and I have insisted that she back-up to a separate hard-drive due to the quantity of stuff she has accumulated and its value. She purchased a WD Elements drive and I transfered data already held onto it via my laptop running LxPupTahr 15.12 and handed it back.
She attempted to create a new folder and raised the error that it was a read-only system. Permissions show Writing as Nobody, and that can't be changed. On a whim, I replugged the drive into my laptop and it shows the same Permissions with the Writing as Owner. Nothing was changed in between. Coincidentally a new drive with my data on it can be read and written to by LxPupTahr but not by her LxPup-Precise-Retro. Same NTFS format, same symptoms. A rising sense of panic led me to plug a FAT32 thumbdrive in, which was immediately recognised and could be written to. I backed up to that.
Plugging the hard drive back in, I went to the Command Line (isn't ignorance a wonderful thing?) and typed /sdb1 -w which returned 'sdb1 is a folder'. And of course nothing changed.

Can somebody wise please guide me through changing the way her laptop OS views NTFS drives? As my machinery and OS has no bother with the OEM format I have never bothered to change it to something 'vanilla' like FAT32. Will I need to do that? The offer to do her an OS update has already met stiff resistance.

ITSMERSH: Hindsight has its own rewards, but since the previous USBHDs in the family were FAT32 and that format is compatible with Misco$oft when the genealogists get a-talking, and Puppy bless its cotton sox can read it anyway, reformatting to ext format was counter productive.
The question is: Can her OS be encouraged to read NTFS?

It sounds as though the way forward could be a reformat of the drive to FAT32 as both Redmond and Puppy seem to agree over that, and/or upgrade her OS. I'll do her a live CD meanwhile to get comfortable with what I think she needs and by and by, swap it onboard.

It looks increasingly as though the best solution is a newer Puppy. M'lady is trialing a thumb drive install of LXArtful done with rcrsn51's ISOBooter (foolproof installs every time here), and lovin' it. Probably that OS will shortly be going onto the laptop and the problem will disappear. There seems little point in chasing a format just for LX Tahr 14.02 when all the other Puppies in the house can read the HDDs as NTFS.
I'll come back shortly to close this out one way or another.

My darling has a Compaq Presario C500 running LxPup-Precise-Retro 14.02 generally quite happily and I'm not allowed near it because I "break it."

There is a red flag right there. That distro is very specific and if "things break" when you use it then the question is " WHY"??? Maybe you should get her running on a more mainstream Puppy so that things don't break so easily.

.

Quote:

She is saving out data from Ancestry and I have insisted that she back-up to a separate hard-drive due to the quantity of stuff she has accumulated and its value. She purchased a WD Elements drive and I transfered data already held onto it via my laptop running LxPupTahr 15.12 and handed it back.

This needs clarification. What do you mean that "she purchased a WD Elements drive and I transfered data already held onto it via my laptop running LxPupTahr 15.12 and handed it back"??
Why would she use YOUR laptop to transfer data she had on HER laptop???

How did this occur? Did she boot your laptop with her HDD attached? Where/How did you transfer the data?

Just a few thoughts as I read this topic.
Fat32 has a 4 GB max size and so large video files which can be greater can't be stored on the system and that is why WD use NTFS which should be compatible with Windows and Linux machines. Better to have a file system that can cope with large files, just in case.
Her laptop is a 32 bit machine and a good Puppy to use is Slacko http://slacko.eezy.xyz/index.php. These days, I use frugal installs which can go anywhere - USB or HD. You can also store large files external to the frugal install.

My darling has a Compaq Presario C500 running LxPup-Precise-Retro 14.02 generally quite happily and I'm not allowed near it because I "break it."

There is a red flag right there. That distro is very specific and if "things break" when you use it then the question is " WHY"??? Maybe you should get her running on a more mainstream Puppy so that things don't break so easily.

Ian, I think you and I are reading this differently. The point wasn't made that it (Precise-Retro) breaks under general usage.....but more that it only breaks when BJF goes near it..!

Think about it.

Perhaps the point is being made - by BJF's other half - that things only "break" when certain individuals go anywhere near them (because they can't leave 'em alone!). That criticism often gets levelled at a lot of folks that think they're tech-savvy. Such folks often can't resist 'tinkering' with things, just to 'make them better'. The view taken by the less 'tech-savvy' is that if it works, why mess around with it (which also applies to the vast majority of Windows users, too)..?

(That criticism has also been levelled at me in the past.....so I know where BJF's 'other half' is coming from..! )

Going back several years, with quite old pups, you needed the ntfs-3g package to write to ntfs. Modern versions have kernels that don't have that problem, but your retro might.

In a console enter this to see if it does have ntfs-3g.

Code:

ntfs-3g -v

_________________I have found, in trying to help people, that the things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem.
When I was a kid I wanted to be older.... This is not what I expected

They are patented and copyrighted and cannot legally be included in FOSS.

They can with permission.

There is an awful lot of proprietary software included in FOSS and I would like to bet that a good proportion of it is used illegally if the law is strictly upheld._________________"Just think of it as leaving early to avoid the rush" - T Pratchett

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